Saturday, July 08, 2006

Holocaust "revisionism" and forgeries

"Revisionists" are fond of dismissing the documents they don't like as forgeries, under flimsiest pretenses. Yet do they fall for forgeries themselves? The answer is an emphatic "Yes!".

One of the most famous forgeries related to "revisionism" is the so-called Mueller document, also known as the Lachout document. For details about this fake see "The Lachout Document. Anatomy of a Forgery". Emil Lachout testified as a witness for the defence at the Zuendel trial in 1988.

The second forgery is the so-called Tagesbefehl-47 and it concerns the number of victims of the Dresden bombing. While it is not directly related to the Holocaust, the famous "revisionist" David Irving relied on it. And after him, many deniers relied on the bogus Dresden death toll, contained in this "document". In fact, deniers shamelessly embellish the death toll even further:

Once again, the German death tolls are downplayed - in contrast to eternal Jewish victimhood. The real number of victims in Dresden alone were in excess of 350,000, possibly as high as 500,000! This in one German city alone!

More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Appr. 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were murdered in one night.

Of course, the very next moment after they have spouted these lies, deniers turn around and criticize the exaggerated extermination camps death tolls, implying that their revision downwards indicates that "we've been lied to", and that no current Nazi death toll can be trusted. Of course, by the same logic Dresden bombing never happened.

It is notable that, like with the fake Hitler's diaries, Irving at first doubted the authenticity of TB47, and then accepted it.

The whole array of forgeries was made by Gregory Douglas aka Peter Stahl. Some of them concern the Holocaust. Douglas forged a letter from Heinrich Himmler to Oswald Pohl, "proving" that Hitler was unaware of the "Final Solution". He also forged some documents about Odilo Globocnik. Douglas himself is a "revisionist". And he is accepted by the leading "revisionist" Germar Rudolf, and also by Willis Carto (or at least he was, until recently).

Ironically, Rudolf also relied on Dragan in at least one article and thanked him in his Report. Not surprisingly, Rudolf also defends Emil Lachout and also thanks him in his Report.

When Douglas' forged "letter of Ischinger" was exposed as a fake, Rudolf defended Douglas thus:

[S]trictly seen, [this document] isn't even a forgery. It is just an essay, like Orson Wells 1938s play "War of the World" ... I think this is really funny. ... What a joke! Who ever did that should become king of jesters!

Such is "Dr." Rudolf's attitude to truthfulness. Notably, the fake report is still presented as authentic on Douglas' site "TBRNews.org".

On the same site we see this article by "Dr." Germar Rudolf, apparently based on Douglas' fakes. In fact, there are many articles with Rudolf's byline on Douglas' site, including this one about Talmud. [Rudolf later clarified that he did not write those, so it's a double fake. 13.05.2017]

And the last fraudulent "document" I wish to discuss, relied on mostly by the "revisionists" of antisemitic bend, is Stuart Kahan's The Wolf of the Kremlin, the fabricated "biography" of Lazar Kaganovich. Who has been taken in? Pierce, Oliver, Rimland (and, presumably, Zuendel), Hoffman, Irving, Heddesheimer and, without doubt, many others (including a non-denier, but certainly a sympathizer Kevin MacDonald).

It is also highly ironic that in the very first issue of the Journal for Historical Review the fake "Tartakow report" was published.

So, next time when a "revisionist" will whine about "Holoforgeries", remember about this list.

14 comments:

At the moment there is an "official" investigation ongoing. Do not wonder - Germany is governed some kind of Neo-Communistic.

Some month ago there some intermediate figures were published by accident. The 25,000 was published then as total number of deaths by some newspapers. But this is only the number of dead bodies that were

Anonymous, you make a PR error when claiming that "neo-Communists" downplay the number of Dresden victims. The truth about the attitude of real Communists (the ones that ruled the GDR for 45 years) to Dresden bombings was precisely opposite: they exploited it without shame and pushed the victims number as high as they could.

"7. As early as 1953, the Dresden civil defence engineer Georg Feydt had struggled to defeat the myth of the city saturated with refugees. He wrote: ‘I cannot imagine a more peaceful and calm picture than Dresden on the afternoon of 13 February 1945.’ Bergander likewise confirmed from his own memory that at no point did Dresden become crammed with refugees. He himself had been called on to help place refugees in accommodation, and apart from those stragglers around the station and the influxes which came with each train, he remembered most being somehow quartered. Bergander then proceeded to calculate that the number of refugees in Dresden could sensibly be put at 200,000; 9,000 in the stations (through which the majority came), 6,000 who had trekked with carts spread out over the whole of Dresden, and 85,000 in emergency accommodation. He doubled the number to include all those who might have somehow found their own lodgings that night. Bergander admitted that this was also a guess, but at least a sensible one arrived at through due process. To have accommodated some half a million refugees would have required one of two measures, neither of which took place: either forced billeting in private homes on a massive scale, or huge temporary camps.

8. The Dresden historian Reichert went one step further. He likewise quoted witnesses who attested that no refugees were billeted in Dresden houses and that no billeting took place in the parks or squares. He then pointed out that the Dresden population could of course not be expected to have been at its pre-war level because of the numbers of men away on active service. Not 630,000, but 567,000 were resident in the city at the time. To that he added 100,000 refugees. This was already a very considerable number in view of the city’s overall population; but nowhere near the ‘one or two million’ suggested by Irving in 1995.

9. How many of these are likely to have been killed? The total figure of just over ‘18,000’ given by the ‘Final Report’ of course included refugees as well as local citizens. Irving, as we have seen, implied that many thousands of those killed were officially only listed as ‘missing’ and so were excluded from the official death roll. Section E of the ‘Final Report’ headed ‘loss of life’ listed under the difficulties in identifying the number of dead: ‘migration of large parts of the population, transport of a large part of the wounded out of the city.’ The ‘Final Report’ put the ‘missing’ figure known to the register of missing persons and the city administration at 35,000, but with the proviso that ‘Exact ascertainment of the number of killed only possible when it becomes established through the register of missing persons and the police offices of registration how many people have left Dresden.’ 10,000 of those missing were later found to be alive.

10. Given the chaotic situation of the last weeks of Hitler’s Germany, with millions of refugees streaming through Europe many more might have escaped official attention. Irving himself obliquely concedes that a mass exodus took place from Dresden after the bombing raid. He quoted a Swedish newspaper of 18 February that ‘Dresden had been so destroyed that the order for its final evacuation had been given.’ In the same paragraph he quoted a refugee: ‘None of the neighbouring towns could send help [after the attack] because all the approaches to Dresden were crowded with refugee columns, peasant carts, pushcarts and army vehicles.’ Thus even on Irving’s own evidence, the ‘missing’ must have included many thousands who had left the city immediately after the raids were over. This was a complicating factor that Dr. Hans Sperling of the Federal Office for Statistics had already brought to Irving’s attention in 1962. Even if a considerable number of those registered as missing had in fact been killed in the raids, it still remains the case that they would have added no more than a few thousand to the overall death-roll, not the numbers needed by Irving to make up the shortfall between the ‘Final Report’ figure of 18,000 and his own estimate of 100,000 or even 250,000. As it is, it is now clear that the Dresden authorities took great pains to count all the dead, identified and unidentified.

11. Conclusive evidence is supplied by burial figures. According to Irving ‘history relates that the last mortal remains of 28,746 air the raids’ victims found their last resting place on the Heidefriedhof cemetery.’ The figure of 28,746 in the Heidefriedhof comes from the cemetery’s head gardener Zeppenfeld, who is quoted by Seydewitz as haven giving this total from the head-count of those buried and the ashes of 9,000 bodies burnt on the Altmarkt. In fact, as we know, 6,865 people were burnt on the Altmarkt. Bodies were also buried at the Johannisfriedhof cemetary. Weidauer quotes the director of administration that 3,660 victims of the attack were buried there. In 1993, new official material was found from the Dresden burial offices [Marschall- und Bestattungsamt] confirming the exact number of those buried. Quite contrary to Irving’s image of chaotic and botched mass-burials, the counting of the dead was conscientiously carried out, with the figures being reported regularly to the city administration. Exactly 17,295 bodies had been buried in the Heidefriedhof cemetary, including the ashes of the 6,865 people burnt on the Altmarkt. In addition to the 3,462 burials in the Johannisfriedhof cemetary, 514 were buried in the Neue Annenfriedhof cemetary. This gives a total of 21,271 registered burials. Head gardener Zeppenfeld’s figure of 28,746 thus overestimated the true number by more than 7,000, unsurprising perhaps, given the fact that it lacked any written authentication and was arrived at only in a rough and ready way. The official figures are far more likely to be closer to the truth.

12. Another possible point of statistical confusion, according to Irving, lay in the fact that many people searched for missing relatives to ‘spare them the indignity of mass burial in a common grave’ or even resorted to digging up their next of kin already buried in mass graves. Even if one were to concede the point, and there are witnesses quoted elsewhere as rescuing bodies from the rubble themselves, it seems highly unlikely that people broke open sealed mass graves in the hope of finding their relatives amongst the number buried there. Moreover, this in no way precluded the victims from appearing on one of the official lists. On the contrary, people who had by then of course identified their relatives would have been bound to have reported their death to the authorities, or would Irving have us believe that thousands were secretly buried on unconsecrated grounds and their deaths for some strange reason kept secret from the authorities? Reichert adds that the burials in the smaller graveyards were scrupulously recorded and did not exceed 2,000. The total number of burials, therefore, approximates well to the total figure of deaths in the raid already known from other sources such as the ‘Final Report’, namely 21,000 compared to 18,000.

13. Irving’s last refuge was to claim that too much of Dresden remained unexcavated to say how many bodies might still be buried. More, of course, did lie hidden beneath the rubble and were not discovered until later. Weidauer points out that from 8 May 1945 until 1966, exactly 1,858 bodies had been dug from the ruins of Dresden. Only in four instances had it been impossible to establish the number of victims in one place. The total for the four could not have been higher than a hundred. He likewise makes clear that by all accounts the majority of victims had died through suffocation and that only in a small number of cases were bodies so mutilated or burnt that the exact number could not be ascertained. Reichert quotes a slightly smaller figure for between October 1945 and late 1957 of 1,557 bodies. Irving, although he must have been aware of Weidauer’s figures, still wrote in 1995 of an immediate post-war Dresden ‘where thousands of victims were still being recovered each week from the ruins’. He argued that too little of Dresden had been excavated to determine how many bodies lay undiscovered. Yet he himself had written in 1963 that ‘most of the bomb sites in Dresden’s Inner City have been cleared anyway.’ Reichert adds (1994) that not a single body had been found since 1990, despite heavy building and despite archaeological excavations on the Altmarkt and around the Taschenberg Palace.

14. When Reichert added the three sums together cited above he came to the inescapable conclusion that the final number of deaths for the raids of February 13/14 and April 17 was 25,000, corresponding to the real TB 47’s prediction of the same number, and all of it based on documentary evidence.

15. How reliable, finally, are these official figures? Widely accepted for many years, the fact that the Communist authorities in post-war Dresden were among those who treated the figure of 35,000 as accurate is an irrelevancy. What interest did the Communists have in playing down the numbers killed? Even if they had, the figure of 25,000 - 35,000 comes not from the Communists but, as we have seen, from the Nazi authorities themselves."

http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/evidence/evans005.asp

So it's 25,000.

But even if we allow for an exaggerated 35,000 toll, it is still a far cry from the forged TB47's 200,000+ and from other deniers' 500,000. So filthy denier maggot would lose even if (s)he were correct.

sergey, you show the same bad faith as the "revisionist" you're fighting.

it's about the same!Who cares how many jews has been killed! what matter is the wll to kill them

Who cares how many people died in Dresden ? There is no science able to determine it precisly. What matter is the war crimes and the point that England was the first courntry to initiate illigal bombing as soon as 1940 (4 months before the first bomb fell on english soil!)

No one will ever know precicely the number of germans civilians wo perished.

Because one side was evil doesn't mean the other side was angel.

Now it's easy to get the dresden victims from 250.000 to 18.000, it's even legal, you won't be jailed...and you could be right!Try to do the same with the other side...though there could be some truth there as well...but it's illegal...

I was not saying you were wrong in your assumptions, it is just that reading your text is like reading some revisionist's arguments.

In the center, the tempeture reached thousand of degree, just like an oven in KZ, so among the ruins, it would have been impossible to find the bodies.

The point is NO ONE will really know the exact number of deaths! And my question was does it matter ?

having read your text, i have the feeling that anyone who doesn't agree with your number are "deniers"

And it's a fact that the revisionist who claimed that 4.000.000 jews could not technically have died in auschwitz were accused of being deniers and condamned! Even if today, history reduced the number to 1.000.000!

What happened to the 3.000.000 undeads ? Who were they in the fist place ? This official "revision" did not even raise a debate?

For "not a denier" you surely are happy to repeat the worst denier tripe, like the 4,000,000 gambit. Since these 4,000,000 were not claimed by the Museum to have been Jews, and they certainly were never used as a part of the 5-6 million estimate, your point is extremely stupid.

As for the deniers tripe, that was the point...they used to point out the fact that 4.000.000 was technically impossible...But it was written at the entrance of aUSCHWITZ for more than 40 years...

I never said anything about the general estimate...If the question about the 3.000.000 people in A is a "deniers tripe", so then, the question remains valid. How can such "error" occured and live for 40 years.

You don't have to be a "HOLOCAUST DENIERS" to wonder.

In my argument, it was just to outline that it is tricky to discuss about exact numbers...and that it is the most used way for the real deniers to deny...as what matters is that jews and other were killed, crime which is known as holocaust...

AND TO POINT OUT THATAnd in the case of Dresden, you're playing the role of a "denier" in this sense...35.000 or 200.000 who cares, the crime is to have thrown 3.000+ tones of the most vicious bombs over a city just to KILL!

"But it was written at the entrance of aUSCHWITZ for more than 40 years..."

So what. The plaque is _still_ wrong, as it says "1.5 million". So what? History is not written from plaques.

"How can such "error" occured and live for 40 years."

Apparently you don't know about the recent history of Poland, what regime it had, etc. You could learn about this, and specifically about the history of the 4,000,000 death toll by simple googling. Instead you chose to make a fool of yourself here.

"You don't have to be a "HOLOCAUST DENIERS" to wonder."

To wonder whether it's all a hoax? Yes, then you have to be a Holocaust denier. Or is there an alternative about which you might want to "wonder"?

"In my argument, it was just to outline that it is tricky to discuss about exact numbers"

As if anybody doubted it.

"And in the case of Dresden, you're playing the role of a "denier" in this sense"

Sorry, I point out that deniers used a forged document to establish the unreal death toll, and somehow I'm like a denier? Aren't you a little wanker...

That's the topic of this posting - the forgeries used by the deniers.Yes, I also point out the real death toll, established through careful research. If you have any problems with how it has been establish, take it up with the historians.

Well you shoudn't lose your temper, and as you don't know me or any of my background. You should be carefull or at least polite. I didn't insult you.

So what. The plaque is _still_ wrong, as it says "1.5 million". So what? History is not written from plaques.

Yes so what? that is all you can say as you didn't even take a single effort to understand what i wanted to say. No that's right, history is not written from plaque. All i said is that it never raised a proper debate. I follow this blog for a long time now, and have a great admiration for Roberto and his work.

sorry to see that you're wasting this blog with a hysterical paranoia tone, considering that everyone who says something you don't like is a deniers "stupid idiots"...So everyone is a suspected deniers. by the way, i never used the term "hoax". I understood your topics about irving. I have no problem with your condamnation of the guy; the problem is your conclusions which stated that they were no more than 18-25-35.000 victims. AS THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW. It is political BUT you state the true established number IS 25000 And i affirm once again that this is this is the same rethoric used by Faurisson and friend. : denoucing forgeries and then telling whatever they want ! That was my sole point!Unfortunately, most documents on those subjetcs are not 100% reliable...on both side... the difference is that i don't think that a forged documents like the Gerstein report make any difference in the truth of the holocauste.

so please, change your tone as your are currently diserving what this blog used to mean.

"Well you shoudn't lose your temper, and as you don't know me or any of my background. You should be carefull or at least polite. I didn't insult you."

Ah really? Who wrote all of the following?

"THIS IS BECOMING CHILDISH AND RIDICULIOUS !

sergey, you show the same bad faith as the "revisionist" you're fighting."

"You seem very biased against anyone asking question..."

"And in the case of Dresden, you're playing the role of a "denier" in this sense..."

All i said is that it never raised a proper debate.

What "proper debate" it should have raised?

I follow this blog for a long time now, and have a great admiration for Roberto and his work.

Somehow I suspect that if Roberto saw this, he would have a couple of strong words for you as well.

I understood your topics about irving. I have no problem with your condamnation of the guy; the problem is your conclusions which stated that they were no more than 18-25-35.000 victims. AS THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW.

Of course there is! If one is not an obscurantist relativist, that is. The correct way is through a careful research.

BUT you state the true established number IS 25000

Do you have any problem with this number, which was arrived at through a careful study of available evidence?

And i affirm once again that this is this is the same rethoric used by Faurisson and friend.

Well, I wasn't mistaken when I characterized you above.

denoucing forgeries and then telling whatever they want ! That was my sole point!

Except of course I did not "tell whatever I wanted", but I relied on the latest research by historians who have carefully studied the problem of the Dresden death toll.

Unfortunately, most documents on those subjetcs are not 100% reliable...on both side...

Nothing is 100% reliable.

the difference is that i don't think that a forged documents like the Gerstein report make any difference in the truth of the holocauste.

Huh, you're babbling about allegedly "forged" Gerstein report contrary to all evidence, and yet you are not denier, but _I_ am like Faurisson? Are you off your meds, or something?

so please, change your tone as your are currently diserving what this blog used to mean.

Don't tell me what to do on this blog and I won't tell you where you should go.

You're out of yourself, read one sentence after the other without grasping the whole...

The funny thing is that i had this kind of arguments with a denier, once.

Point is if you consider a "three times written" testemony of a SS prisonner in french hand that includes such unexplicable craps as in the Gerstein report(s) as a historical source...then you should not even try to fight "controversies".

But you cannot deny that it is possible that in a fire of 3000 degrees...body dissapear, and cannot be counted...3.300 tons of bomb have been droped in two waves in a city full of refugeenow 60 years after the fact, there would be means to count the victims ?

If not, it is like reclaiming the remains of the millions that dies in Treblinka, Sobibor etc. (You used to fight those silly "where are the body arguments, no ?)

So yes i have the same problem with you stating that the 25.000 victims is the real number than the faurissonlike saying that a couple of thousands died from Typhus in auschwitz...

Do you really have a problem with that ? If yes , your site has no meaning. You cannot fight the ones who try to minimize the victims of the holocaust and minimizing the allied victims.

So unfortunately, you are too quick at judging people, and yes you were wrong in considering me as a denier.

And i would love to have Roberto reading carefully what i have written so far